News feeds

What are RSS feeds?

RSS feeds let you see when a website has added new content. You can get the latest releases and information from our Press Office in one place, as soon as it is published, rather than having to keep visiting our site.

What does RSS stand for?

Feeds are often just referred to by the shorthand of ‘RSS’, but are also called web feeds or news feeds. There is debate as to what exactly RSS stands for, but most people accept ‘Really Simple Syndication’ as a good working definition. In essence they are just machine readable web pages.

How do I use feeds?

Step one

In order to subscribe to and then read the feeds that you want, the first thing you’ll need is something called a news reader, or aggregator. This is a bit of software that checks the feed and then lets you read or view the new content that we have published. It also means you can group all your feeds together in one place.

Examples of news readers include netvibes, Bloglines, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and My Yahoo! but there are many more to choose from and we don’t recommend any particular news reader.

Step two

Once you have a news reader you just need to decide what content you want it to receive and subscribe to the feed. On our site click on the orange RSS button you will see on selected pages, such as the main press office page.

How to subscribe works differently for different readers. You might be able to drag and drop the orange RSS button to your reader. Or another way is to copy the address of the feed from your browser's address bar and paste this into your reader. Most readers that are available will have specific help sections - refer to this if you get stuck.

Step three

Your news reader should now update with new information from your chosen feed.